News, news, news..

Niagara Falls?

Yep…I’m hooking up with Michael Reichmann of The Luminous Landscape to shoot material (shots and video) for our upcoming Lightroom 2.0 video tutorial.Now, don’t make too much about the timing of this…this is the only time Michael have to actually get together to shoot stuff photographically before we tape our video.

We wanted to shoot stuff together (something a bit North of Antarctica ya know) in order to have working photo samples to demo our respective workflows. The release of the video tutorial will come after Lightroom 2.0 ships (we really can’t say exactly that will be).

So, stayed tuned for an update, but I’ll be gone for the week starting, well, now! I’ll try to post something while we work. Michael it seems, has booked a suite (not the honeymoon suite I hope) so we can shoot night shots of the falls & the fireworks (assuming they do it in the rain). So, we’ll see what happens…(or doesn’t).

Original post by PSN Editorial Staff

Source: Myrtlebeach Online
Written by Steve Palisin

Art has always captured rock guitarist Ace Frehley’s eye.

After joining KISS in the mid-1970s at its lead guitarist, with the “Spaceman” makeup and silver sprayed hair, Frehley designed the group’s logo.

“There was a point in my life when I wanted to become a graphic artist,” he said last month in a phone chat from Westchester County, N.Y. “But the music kind of took over.”

Frehley will play tonight at House of Blues in North Myrtle Beach.

He said he’s shooting for 12 tracks on his next album, his first in 18 years, with a release in early summer. Studio work has spanned more than 6 months, and some of the songs go back 12 years.

Speaking about his avocation, Frehley said, “I always knew I was a good artist. I just finished up designs for a biker shirt for the next tour. I just love playing with art. I’ve been working on Photoshop forever.”

Read entire story

Original post by PSN Editorial Staff

Overlook Center to Reflect Adobe’s Commitment to “Green” Building Practices

Press Release: WALTHAM, Mass.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE - News) today announced it has entered into a purchase and sale agreement with Normandy Real Estate Partners to acquire Overlook Center upon substantial completion at 21-61 Hickory Drive, Waltham, Massachusetts. According to the purchase agreement, Normandy will complete construction of an office building shell and core totaling approximately 108,500 square feet of space, a parking structure and site improvements. The transaction, valued at $44.7 million, is expected to close by May 2009, subject to the agreement’s closing conditions.

“The Boston area, with its rich ecosystem of technical talent and innovation, is important to Adobe’s business and this purchase reinforces our commitment to having a significant presence in the area,” said Rick Treitman, site leader for Adobe’s Boston operations. “Like many of our other sites around the world, the Overlook Center site will be a cutting-edge building that reflects our commitment to eco-friendly operation and community involvement while offering first-class amenities for our employees.”

Upon completion, the new Adobe property will feature contemporary design elements of glass and steel and include approximately 360 spaces of on-site covered parking, a café, fitness center, triangular conference facility, abundant natural light and a courtyard drop-off area. From Overlook Center’s elevated setting there will be dramatic 270-degree views to the north and south. The building is expected to be ready for occupancy by late 2009.

Normandy and Adobe are jointly pursuing LEED certification through the United States Green Building Council (USGBC) for both the exterior shell and the interior of the building.

“Normandy, our local partner Neelon Properties and the City of Waltham are thrilled to bring a leading technology company like Adobe to Overlook Center. We were looking to build this property for a company that was committed to an exceptional product for both its employees as well as the environment,” says Justin Krebs, a principal in Normandy Real Estate Partners who oversees the firm’s portfolio in the Greater Boston area. “Leveraging our vertically integrated platform that includes development and construction capabilities, we will be able to deliver to Adobe a market-leading, sustainably-designed building that is cutting-edge in terms of design, building technology and amenities, helping the company to retain and attract the highest quality local talent. Our vision for this property has become a reality.”

Adobe currently occupies leased office space in Newton, Mass, home to approximately 200 employees who are engaged in a cross-section of functions, including research and development, marketing, customer support and sales. Once fully complete, Overlook Center will house those employees and provide Adobe with room for continued growth in the Boston area.

About Adobe Systems Incorporated
Adobe revolutionizes how the world engages with ideas and information – anytime, anywhere and through any medium. For more information, visit www.adobe.com.

Original post by PSN Editorial Staff

Let Liz and Kate keep their airbrushed beauty. They’ve earned it

Source: The Guardian
Written by Julie Burchill

Votes for Women! The Equal Pay Act! Divorce! Abortion! Ooo, don’t you love the smell of full-on feminist legislation in the morning? This, girls, was the 20th century.

And now, lucky ladies that we are, we’re about to get … um, a law in France banning all ‘ultra-thin’ models and in this country, if not a law, then a request from the British Fashion Council to the Periodical Publishers Association to, in the words of heat magazine, ‘form a group to curb the use of airbrushed and digitally enhanced pictures.’

This followed an inquiry held last year into the health of models (originally sparked by the size-zero debate) during which the leader of the inquiry, Baroness Kingsmill, concluded that airbrushing could ‘perpetuate an unachievable aesthetic’. Magazines including Elle, Hello! and Vogue are apparently ‘considering’ new practices which would mean less retouching.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Basically, everything. In the past, pro-female law changes stated unequivocally that women were every bit as able as men to vote, work, divorce and have sex. That is, that they were adults. But these new ones … laws, guidelines, suggestions, whatever … portray women as neurotic, looks-obsessed cretins who are likely to collapse in a weeping heap of jelly if they come across proof that any other woman is better-looking than they are.

If you do exist, ladies - grow up, or kill yourself, or something! But don’t kid yourself that all broads are as tragically low in self-respect as you are, and don’t hand this absolute gift to the sort of creepy man who soothes his sad soul by imagining that every woman between the ages of 16 and 61 lives in a permanent self-loathing state of competition with every other woman on the planet. Personally, I love good-looking women - it gives a girl something to perve over if there are no good-looking men around.

Read entire article

Original post by PSN Editorial Staff

Learn Lightroom 2.0 with D65

Adobe released Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.0 beta which features enhancements such as dual-monitor support and localized dodge and burn corrections. It is the first Adobe application to support 64-bit for Mac OS X 10.5 Intel Macs and Microsoft Vista 64-bit operating systems.

We are now teaching the transition to 2.0 and all the features.

Do you want to quickly process your files and have them look awesome?
Do you want to be able to find any image in a blink of an eye?
Are you keywording properly and using metadata to your advantage?
Do your prints look the way you want? Can you convert to CMYK?
Wondering how to set up a real archive?
Are you working in 16-bit and using ProPhoto?
Can you extend the dynamic range of an image?
Is your computer optimized for workflow, or is it running slow?
Would you like to blow your clients away with quality they rarely see?

If you’ve asked yourself any of these questions, then D65 is THE Workshop for you.

The D-65 workshops teach bullet-proof techniques to increase workflow productivity and save time. These workshops demonstrate ways to automate, search, archive, present and deliver the zillions of images today’s photographers accumulate. Attendees will learn to create files perfect for reproduction; tagged, named, sized and sharpened correctly, along with attaching the appropriate metadata and keywords. You’ll learn the correct way to keep your images organized, and archived. The workshops are intensive, and focus on optimizing digital photography — from input to output.

D-65 totally immerses you in this four-day digital worflow workshop. Our days consist of hands-on training and lectures supplemented by a comprehensive D65 digital workflow textbook. By the end of the program, you will have the ability to create your own successful workflow, and better communicate with your clients.

The program centers around Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop, going far beyond the basics of digital. It truly prepares the professional photographer, art director, photo editor or advanced amateur for the digital world.
The workshops are taught by Seth Resnick and Jamie Spritzer and cover:

* Adobe Lightroom & Adobe Lightroom Beta 2.0
* Photoshop CS3
* Digital Asset Management
* Optimizing Lightroom & Photoshop Preferences
* Color Spaces
* File Formats
* Digital Standards
* Exposing for Digital
* White Balance
* Color Management From Input to Output
* Profiling Monitors & Systems
* Using Lightroom: The 5 Modules
* Lightroom Catalog & Preferences
* File Naming Conventions
* Metadata & Keywording
* Rating Your Images
* “Tweaking” Your Files - the beauty of Parametric Editing
* Sharpening : Capture, Creative and Output
* Processing Files
* Custom Presets
* Austomating Workflow
* Ceating Actions for Lightroom
* Client Delivery
* FTP File Transmission
* Web Galleries, Slideshows, PDF Presentations
* Printing, Soft Proofing & ICC Profiles
* Converting to CMYK
* Archiving
* Retouching for Digital
* The Business of Digital
* Copyright and Security
* Digital Camera Maintenance

SCHEDULE
Los Angeles: May 16-19 Sold Out
Denver: June 20-23
Portland,OR: August 8-11
New York: Sept 12- 15
Chicago: October 3- 6
San Francisco: November 14-17
Austin, TX : December 12 -15

Workshop Fee: $1099.00

For more information go to: http://www.d-65.com/workshops

Original post by PSN Editorial Staff

HOW TO SPOT PHOTOSHOP CHICANERY.

Source: Slate
Written by Jacob Leibenluft

After a New Yorker profile implied that “king of the photo touchup” Pascal Dangin had airbrushed photos taken by Annie Leibovitz for Dove’s high-profile “Campaign for Real Beauty,” the company issued a statement last Friday explaining that Dangin had only removed dust and performed minor color corrections. Is it possible to determine whether the Dove photos were retouched?

Maybe, but it would be very difficult. Amateur retouching can leave seams where two different images are spliced together. But in the case of an expert retoucher like Dangin, visible signs would have been diligently scrubbed away. Additionally, since images can be distorted when they are compressed into other file formats (PDF) or printed in a magazine, any apparent smudges or irregularities in one of the Dove photos might well be artifacts of the photo’s reproduction, rather than signs of tampering.

Read entire article

Original post by PSN Editorial Staff

Source: The New Yorker
Written by Lauren Collins

For a charity auction a few years back, the photographer Patrick Demarchelier donated a private portrait session. The lot sold, for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, to the wife of a very rich man. It was her wish to pose on the couple’s yacht. “I call her, I say, ‘I come to your yacht at sunset, I take your picture,’ ” Demarchelier recalled not long ago. He took a dinghy to the larger boat, where he was greeted by the woman, who, to his surprise, was not wearing any clothes.

“I want a picture that will excite my husband,” she said.

Capturing such an image, by Demarchelier’s reckoning, proved to be difficult. “I cannot take good picture,” he said. “Short legs, so much done to her face it was flat.” Demarchelier finished the sitting and wondered what to do. Eventually, he picked up the phone: “I call Pascal. ‘Make her legs long!’ ”

Pascal Dangin is the premier retoucher of fashion photographs. Art directors and admen call him when they want someone who looks less than great to look great, someone who looks great to look amazing, or someone who looks amazing already—whether by dint of DNA or M·A·C—to look, as is the mode, superhuman. (Christy Turlington, for the record, needs the least help.)

In the March issue of Vogue Dangin tweaked a hundred and forty-four images: a hundred and seven advertisements (Estée Lauder, Gucci, Dior, etc.), thirty-six fashion pictures, and the cover, featuring Drew Barrymore. To keep track of his clients, he assigns three-letter rubrics, like airport codes. Click on the current-jobs menu on his computer: AFR (Air France), AMX (American Express), BAL (Balenciaga), DSN (Disney), LUV (Louis Vuitton), TFY (Tiffany & Co.), VIC (Victoria’s Secret).

Vanity Fair, W, Harper’s Bazaar, Allure, French Vogue, Italian Vogue, V, and the Times Magazine, among others, also use Dangin. Many photographers, including Annie Leibovitz, Steven Meisel, Craig McDean, Mario Sorrenti, Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, and Philip-Lorca diCorcia, rarely work with anyone else. Around thirty celebrities keep him on retainer, in order to insure that any portrait of them that appears in any outlet passes through his shop, to be scrubbed of crow’s-feet and stray hairs. Dangin’s company, Box Studios, has eighty employees and occupies a four-story warehouse in the meatpacking district. “I have Patrick!” an assistant to Miranda Priestly, the editor of Runway, exclaims in “The Devil Wears Prada,” but her real-life counterparts probably log as much time speed-dialling Pascal.

Read entire article

Original post by PSN Editorial Staff

On the Lightroom Journal blog, Tom Hogarty announced that the DNG Specification has been updated. He also indicated that the DNG Codec for Windows Vista (32-bit) has been posted to Adobe Labs.

He said: “This update addresses several industry requirements for the DNG format including the formalization of the concept of a “camera profile” and a metadata tag to validate your image data.

The definition of a camera profile for the DNG format as well as the allowance for multiple camera profiles to be embedded in a single DNG file will provide the industry with the ability to characterize raw data in an efficient and standardized format.(Think ICC profiles but for raw data)”

Read original post

Original post by PSN Editorial Staff

Easy to use plug-in for Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Elements helps photographers selectively blur and/or vignette areas of an image

Press Release: Portland, OR – onOne Software, Inc., announced that its new software plug-in for Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Elements – FocalPoint 1.0 – is now available for immediate download. onOne Software’s FocalPoint is a selective focus and vignetting plug-in designed to help photographers easily blur and/or vignette areas of an image.

Popular among professional wedding, portrait and commercial photographers, the soft defocused look typically produced in camera by using special selective focus or tilt-shift lenses, filters or vignetting hoods can now be created quickly within Photoshop using onOne Software’s new FocalPoint. This new plug-in provides both professional and advanced amateur photographers with additional creative options when editing their images in Photoshop.

“The new onOne Software FocalPoint plug-in, which is now available for download, gives photographers total control over how they apply creative focusing effects to their image after the image has been shot,” said Craig Keudell, president of onOne Software. “It’s just like having a lens inside of Photoshop. Users set the location of their ‘sweet spot’ of focus directly on their image and then control the amount, kind of blur used and even lighten or darken the edges quickly and easily.”

FocalPoint provides photographers with a way to create realistic depth of field control, plane of focus control and selective focus to any image after it is photographed allowing for more control and precision. The plug-in’s unique FocusBug control has a tangible, hardware feel much like adjusting a lens. This special on-screen control makes it fast for a photographer to choose the “sweet spot” of focus either in a round aperture shape or a planar aperture shape and then control how much and what kind of blur they would like to add. Blur choices include a standard defocused look as well as a blur that simulates motion. This has a huge benefit over hardware tools like auxiliary lenses and filters because it allows the photographer to control the focus and blur after the image is taken, giving them more control and requiring fewer shots in camera.

FocalPoint uses the same FocusBug controls to allow the photographer to simultaneously selectively blur as well as lighten or darken the areas outside of the “sweet spot” of focus. FocalPoint can also be used just for vignetting without blurring the image at all. In addition, the FocusBug allows users to tilt the chosen “sweet spot” aperture in 3D, simulating the tilt effect of a view camera or tilt-shift lens. This allows users to increase or decrease the amount of feathering or blur across a plane.

And once a photographer has created an effect they like, they can save it as a preset so they can easily recall it. FocalPoint remembers all of the settings applied including the relative size and position of the FocusBug so users can apply it to similar images without having to make any additional adjustments. By using Photoshop actions to access a FocalPoint preset photographers can even batch process an entire folder of images.

FocalPoint is designed for use with Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Elements and supports Adobe Photoshop CS2 and CS3 and Elements versions 4.0.1, 5, 6 and higher. It is compatible with Microsoft Windows XP and Vista and Mac OS X 10.4.10 and 10.5 and higher. onOne Software’s FocalPoint plug-in is available now for $159.95 from onOne Software authorized distributors and resellers, or direct from onOne Software at www.onOnesoftware.com.

About onOne Software
onOne Software develops time-saving software solutions for professional and advanced amateur photographers in the digital photography and graphic design industries. onOne Software solutions have been created to help photographers spend more of their time behind the camera taking pictures instead of the computer workstation. Such solutions include a wide range of easy-to-use plug-in enhancements for Adobe Photoshop, Photoshop Elements and QuarkXPress®.

Founded in 2005, onOne Software is a privately held company located in Portland, Oregon. For additional information, visit www.onOnesoftware.com or call 1-888-968-1468.

Original post by PSN Editorial Staff

Photoshop Disasters web site recently took a swipe at Photoshop User TV for doing “inept reflections” in an announcement at the most recent Photoshop World about the Photoshop User TV live taping. See: Photoshop World: Photoshop User TV Useless At Photoshop.

Jeeesh, everybody is a critic!

Original post by Jeff Schewe